New York Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the Supreme Court for its recent rulings on affirmative action, student loan debt forgiveness, and freedom of religion. She described the “dangerous creep toward authoritarianism” while sounding alarmingly authoritarian herself, arguing that we should be investigating justices and subpoenaing them.
There’s a term for countries that behave in that fashion: banana republics. Appearing on CNN’s “Face the Nation” Sunday with dour-looking host Dana Bash, AOC said:
These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep toward authoritarianism and centralization of power in the courts. In fact, we have members of the court themselves with Justice Elena Kagan saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature.
In reality–where the congresswoman does not live–the closest SCOTUS ever came to acting like a legislature was arguably in the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, where the court literally made up a right out of thin air.
Democrats have made it a daily theme to opine about the “danger to democracy,” yet here, the 33-year-old is openly questioning the legitimacy of one of the three branches of our government and actively undermining it. She even thinks impeachment should be on the table for those who don’t rule the way she would have liked.
Bash asked her, “Are you also saying that the justices’ power should somehow be limited?” AOC:
I truly do. And this is not a new development in history. This is part of our system of checks and balances.
The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court, which is what we are seeing now, from the overturning of abortion rights, to the ruling that discrimination and, frankly, stripping the full personhood and dignity of LGBTQ people in the United States.
Watch:
She makes thinly-veiled threats:
And so I believe that if Justice — if Chief John Roberts will not come before Congress for an investigation voluntarily, I believe that we should be considering subpoenas. We should be considering investigations. We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines where we see members of Congress — where we see members of the Supreme Court potentially breaking the law, as we saw in the refusal with Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases implicating his wife in January 6.
There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach, and abuse of power. And the Supreme Court has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.
And, in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.
Ocasio-Cortez has proved herself to be no expert on the law, tweeting Friday after affirmative action in college admissions was struck down that, “If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged.” My colleague Nick Arama torched her for her non-understanding of how our system works:
First, the case had nothing at all to do with legacy applicants. SCOTUS “didn’t touch that” because it had nothing to do with the matter before it. They can’t just rule on matters not even before them. What a failure to truly understand the role of the Court.
President Biden and folks like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and AOC pitch temper tantrums every time they are shot down by SCOTUS. However, these decisions were soundly reasoned, and whether one agrees with them or not, these folks are playing a dangerous game when they try to shred the legitimacy of the highest court in the land.